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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

최신자료
Africa as a Success Story: Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa
NBER
2025.12.09
We provide an overview of the explanations for the relative lack of state formation historically in Africa. In doing so we systematically document for the first time the extent to which Africa was politically decentralized, calculating that in 1880 there were probably 45,000 independent polities which were rarely organized on ethnic lines. At most 2% of these could be classified as states. We advance a new argument for this extreme political decentralization positing that African societies were deliberately organized to stop centralization emerging. In this they were successful. We point out some key aspects of African societies that helped them to manage this equilibrium. We also emphasize how the organization of the economy was subservient to these political goals.